As A New Year Dawns

One of the hallmarks of text study as we pursue it in our Friday morning Chumash class at Shelter Rock is the way we focus on the minor fissures in the narrative—the discrepancies, the slight contradictions, the instances of inner-textual illogic, the places in which the text self-contradicts in ways that readers see easily but that the text itself seems not to notice—and take those the apparent “errors” in the text to point to truths hiding just beneath the narrative surface. I can’t claim to have invented this method of text study, although I can also say that I don’t know any setting in which it is more vigorously pursued than on Friday mornings at Shelter Rock. This method is at the core of my own as-yet-unpublished Torah commentary as well and derives directly, at least in terms of my own willingness to engage with it, from the decades I’ve spent listening to congregants, trying to help them unravel their own narratives, counselling them in times of stress and distress, and offering interpretations of their own stories that I hope will be useful to them.

In that latter context as well, you see, it is often the case that the way into the deeper meaning of someone’s personal story is through discrepancy, inconsistency, and narrative discordance. In other words, when the story I’m being told that I’m being told doesn’t quite match the story I actually am being told, then the careful dissection of that discordance is often precisely the context in which the most interesting truths can surface. Theodor Reik, the only one of Freud’s inner-circle disciples not to have also been a practicing physician, wrote a classic book called Listening with the Third Ear in which he described his career as a listener in similar terms, explaining specifically how the real skill for any psychoanalyst to master is the art of hearing what the speaker leaves unsaid (that’s what it means to listen with the “third” ear) and how that specific ability often derives directly from taking incongruity in even a simply told story seriously and thoughtfully.

I mention all this today because I’d like to suggest that what applies to text study and to any counselor’s effort to listen with his or her third ear also applies to religion and that it is often precisely in those instances of disconnect between theory and reality that lie some of the most interesting truths.

Rosh Hashanah is an excellent example. Presented in our prayerbooks over and over as the commencement of the season of judgment, as the day on which the great Book of Life in the heavenly tribunal is opened and all are summoned to stand as defendants before Judge God, any reasonable observer would expect the mood in our communities—both in synagogue and at home—to be, to say the very least, somewhere between dour and somber. And yet that is not at all how I experience Rosh Hashanah or how anyone does: for Jewish families, Rosh Hashanah is a very happy, warm, satisfying time of the year, a time of communal warmth, a time for families (in non-pandemic mode) to gather, to eat together, and to enjoy spending time in each other’s company. The whole experience is far more encouraging than discouraging. And in that discrepancy between the natural ill ease that should attend the notion of being judged for one’s sinful behavior and the way in which the holiday actually is experienced—that is precisely the kind of fissure in the larger narrative that reveals a secret that would otherwise be hidden from view.

I suppose you could interpret that discrepancy in lots of different ways, but for me personally the disconnect has to do with the concept of confidence. We all know the many ways in which we have done poorly in the year drawing to a close and could surely have tried harder to do good in the world. But we endlessly use the phase Avinu Malkeinu to reference Judge God because we feel—not because we have any right to, but because we almost universally do anyway—we sense that God’s judgment of us all will be more similar to the way parents evaluate their children’s behavior indulgently and kindly than to the way that harsh, merciless judges evaluate the behavior of the defendants who are tried in their courtrooms. So Avinu (“our Father”) comes before Malkeinu (“our King”) because that is how we feel things to be as the Book of Life is finally turned to our personal pages and the Judge decides what the coming year should bring each of us personally. And it is that sense of hopeful confidence that we bring to the pews and to our holiday tables, one that makes us aware that, for all we have entered the season of divine judgment, our heavenly Judge can still be reasonably expected to be as forgiving as parents are of their own children’s missteps, errors of judgment, and ethical blunders.

And that brings me to New Year’s Day 2021. We certainly should be on tenterhooks about more or less everything. There are several new vaccines that should bring the COVID era to its welcome close…but the government has yet to explain how exactly it plans to inoculate all 330 million Americans in a way that is effective, fair, and well-organized, let alone how to administer two different shots to each of us. (And on top of that, new strains of the virus continue to evolve, thus making it unclear how effective the current vaccines will actually be in eradicating the virus totally.) The incoming administration has promised to take environmental issues seriously and to promote legislation accordingly…but much of the damage to the environment permitted by the outgoing administration is apparently far too severe to be undone merely by counter-decree. (And on top of that, it is far from clear that Congress will be at all eager to support that kind of initiative anyway. For more, click here.) Racial justice issues have come to the fore in a way that would have seemed, to say the least, unlikely even just a couple of years ago…and yet it’s hard to see any actual progress as unarmed black men continue to be shot and killed by police officers who are supposed to know how to arrest unarmed individuals without shooting them…and as recently as this last week in Columbus, Ohio. (For more on that incident, click here.) And on top of that, the Supreme Court has formally declined to review the rule the prevents citizens from suing police officers accused of misconduct despite the fact that that rule makes change much less likely.) I can go on. The problems facing the nation are grave, their solutions far from obvious. We should all be racked with anxiety. Of the top five issues facing the incoming administration, not a single one comes tied to an obvious, simple solution (click here for such a list, but maybe pour yourself a giant whiskey first). And on top of all that the Congress itself remains riven, and the possibility of self-induced governmental paralysis as real as it’s ever been.

So we should all be in a state of high anxiety seasoned with large dollops of angst and ill ease. And yet…as 2021 dawns, I feel myself inexplicably hopeful. Maybe it’s the concept itself of a new year as a kind of tabula rasa in time that exists, at least so far, only in theory…and thus also in a kind of unsullied, pristine perfection. As we look forward, we see a year in which no one has been unfairly hurt or discriminated against, in which no one’s trust has been betrayed, in which no act of kindness has been repaid with uncaring or harshness. As we peer, together and separately, into the future, we see a stretch of as-yet-unwritten history in which disputes–including international ones—can theoretically be resolved fairly and justly, in which citizens of all political orientations can potentially join together to act together for the strengthening of the union and the betterment of all its constituent parts, in which individuals faced with aggressive incivility can seek and gain redress without having to take to the streets to demand it.

I suppose that rabbis are supposed to think of Rosh Hashanah as the “real” New Year’s Day, not January 1. But I somehow manage to live in both those houses at once: part of me easily thinks of today as falling somewhere in the first half of 5781, while another part of me—the part that answers easily when asked that my birthday is in June, not Sivan, and that I got married in December, not Kislev—that part of me really does think of a new year as dawning on January 1. And so I leave you all with a few lines Walt Whitman wrote a cool 172 years ago as he contemplated the dawn of 1848, words that feel to me as fresh and inspiring as they must have back then to Whitman’s readers and admirers: “Days of a coming year promising change, / Yet full of promises, we need but watch / And pray for guardianship to come / Over caprices and all foolish ways! / So shall bright sunshine in advancing days / And starry invitations leads to Heavenly praise.” Amen to that!